


All or Nothing

by kenjideath



Series: Commissions [5]
Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Self-Hatred, Soul Bond, Telepathy, Trope Inversion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-13
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:28:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7478826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenjideath/pseuds/kenjideath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where everyone forms a soul bond, Seth and Dean don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [devon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/devon/gifts).



> This is a commission for the lovely [devon](http://devoncarrots.tumblr.com/). It was inspired by thefourthvine's [Fastening One Heart To Every Falling Thing](http://archiveofourown.org/works/730574), which I think about probably every day of my life. If you don't understand something about the world building, feel free to ask! (The answer might be "wait and see" but this is a bit more ambitious than my usual stuff and it's possible some things aren't as clear as they should be).

Seth got his psychics tested for the first time in the Fourth grade. He already knew he wasn’t very sensitive, because his stepdad and Brandon were, and he didn’t have any of the signs. Brandon was a 4.2 and sometimes he punched the wall when their mom couldn’t get the coffee maker to work, and Seth’s stepdad was a 3.9 and he meditated every morning to keep his mental walls strong. Seth had never caught a stray flicker of emotion from anyone, so he was ready to be pronounced an average 2.7 or so and get back to class.

In the nurse’s office, Seth raised his hand for all the beeps and his height and weight checked out fine, but he couldn’t read as many lines on the chart as he was supposed to. The nurse just chuckled when he pouted about it, writing a note for him to take home. “I’m sure you’ll be very handsome in glasses,” she said. She handed him the clunky headphones for the psychics test. “Last one, now. It’s very similar to the hearing test. Just raise your right hand when you feel happy, and your left hand when you feel sad.”

So Seth sat with his ears sweating in the headphones, still trying to read the fourth line of the eye chart as the seconds crawled by. He was just wondering which hand he should raise for “bored” when the nurse poked at the humming black machine the headphones were hooked up to. “Oh, did this old thing break down again?” she asked.

Ten minutes later, she said, “Pooh, let me get Mr. Phillips in here. He can always pull some life out of it.”

When they finally figured it out, everyone’s eyes got wide and their voices got quiet and hushed. The principal called Seth’s stepdad, and he took off work to come right to the school and kneel in front of the chair Seth had curled himself up in, waiting in the administrative office.

“I’m a nothing,” Seth told him. He blinked rapidly, not wanting to cry in front of his stepdad.

His stepfather pulled him into a crushing hug. “No,” he said. His voice was strong like his arms. “You are my brilliant, imaginative, wonderful son, and you will _never_ let anyone call you nothing, even yourself, understand?”

Seth nodded jerkily, and he almost believed it.

But his psychics had tested at 0.0 and even though it would be years before he fully realized what that meant, he still knew that zero was nothing.

\---

Dean missed his first psychics test. He wasn’t in school, but curled up in the cupboard under the sink with his hands pressed over his ears.

_yeah take it cunt need a fix anything I’ll do what the fuck did you say goddamn fag ruined my life motherfucker kill him this time should’ve made him use a rubber fucking kid bitch whore anything anything please don’t one hit stop help HELP YES PLEASE NO_

It didn’t help, nothing helped, he couldn’t hide from them. They ebbed and flowed but they pecked at his mind like burning ants with a magnifying glass, eating away at his brain with hot, sharp teeth.

By eighth grade, Dean had figured out that pot helped a little bit, made other people’s thoughts flow over him easy and smooth, and he was smoking in the woods behind the school with Sami Callihan while his classmates filed through the nurse’s office, testing their eyes and ears and brains for change.

By tenth grade, Dean had dropped out. Outside of the public school system, psychic testing meant going to a specialist, shelling out tons of dough. It wasn’t something that Dean thought about, when he could dig his own thoughts out from everyone else’s.

It turned out that there were plenty of drugs out there and most of them helped, in their own special way. There was tons to learn and Dean was ready to study.

\---

By middle school, Seth knew that he wanted to be a writer. He filled journals with poetry and sometimes he worried that it wasn’t very good, but his stepdad beamed when Seth shared some of them, so clearly proud Seth could see it, even if he couldn’t feel it.

In eighth grade they got to pick an elective for the first time and Seth spent the whole first day of school practically vibrating in anticipation of ninth period Creative Writing.

Mr. Fintstock was a tall, imposing man with an artist’s passion. “All art,” he boomed, “arises from the human desire to connect. To show others the feelings locked away in their own heads. When you bond,” he said, and some of kids tittered, because they all knew, at this point, that you needed to have sex to bond, and in their 14-year-old minds, that seemed more important than a permanent mental connection. Mr. Fintstock glared at the gigglers and they quickly stopped and scrambled to sit upright. “When you bond,” he continued, “you will gain an understanding of the human heart that you can’t even fathom now. It’s only then that you will be able to produce true art.”

A couple of girls in the first row sighed dreamily, eyes lit up at the romance of it. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t get started now,” Mr. Fintstock said. “Tonight, I want you all to meditate like you practiced in Mentation class. Expand your consciousness. Feel the _mood_ of your neighborhood and try to capture it in a poem. We’ll read them aloud tomorrow.”

That night, Seth stared down at the first page of the brand new notebook his stepfather had gotten him to celebrate the start of the new school year. The page was blank and empty and Seth didn’t have anything to fill it with.

Seth ripped out every page of every notebook in his room and tore them up until he didn’t have to see the garbage on them anymore, and then he told his stepdad that he wanted to switch into another elective.

“Well, it’s still the first week, so you probably can,” his stepdad said, sounding confused, “but are you sure you want to? You were so excited to get into Creative Writing.”

“It sucks and I hate it,” Seth said. He had to be careful not to cry, or his stepdad would ask all kinds of questions. “I’ll take anything else, I don’t care.”

The only elective with a spot still open was Meteorology. It was boring and Seth slept through most of it, but his grades were still good, so no one could complain.

\---

Dean’s mom could be a whore because her bondmate had fucked off somewhere. Bonds couldn’t be broken and you could only have one, so her johns didn’t have to worry about getting stuck with her. Dean had always assumed her bondmate was in jail. He knew the fucker wasn’t dead because his mom showed all the signs of gap disorder whenever she sobered up for a day or so. She had headaches all the time and sometimes she reacted to things that weren’t there, and her eyes never seemed quite focused.

People thought shit about Dean’s mom all the time. It wasn’t very interesting because they said it, too. _Whore slut skank cum rag coked up streetwalker with her lunatic son_ and Dean didn’t care but he hated it when people got up in his face so he beat the shit out of one of them, some fucking kid, Dean didn’t care, didn’t know why that word _crazy_ pissed him off so much, but he stomped on the kid’s chest and let the pain flood into his own mind, sharp and pure and distracting.

People stopped saying shit to him after that. They still thought it, but now the thoughts were tinged with fear and it was better, so, so much better than disdain or disgust or pity.

\---

Melanie Williams asked Seth to the Bon Voyage dance at the end of eighth grade. Seth waited outside the decked out gym in his dorky suit for over an hour before she showed up on the arm Johnny Mayard and laughed at him in front of everybody.

“You really can’t sense that I don’t like you?” she asked. She sounded amazed, like she couldn’t even imagine being so deficient.

Seth’s whole body burned with humiliation while he struggled not to cry. He hadn’t sensed anything. He _never_ sensed anything.

\---

Dean assumed that his mom’s bondmate was in prison. He didn’t know where he’d gotten the idea; she’d never said. Maybe it was because his own father was in prison. They weren’t the same person, but maybe they’d met. Maybe they were cellmates.

It was a funny thought. Dean laughed whenever it trickled through his mind, surfacing briefly into the tiny box where his own thoughts lived.

\---

Seth wasn’t the only person in the world who was a zero. He knew that. Buzz Aldrin had been one, and Seth’s stepdad had sent him a Neil Armstrong quote, once, about how he was jealous of Buzz, not having to struggle to stay unbonded in order to leave the world behind with the risk of gap disorder. The interviewer laughed, and so did Neil.

Seth didn’t really care about that; he cared about Shawn Michaels. Shawn was the best wrestler and he didn’t need to read the crowd or his opponent to be the best, he just needed to be an incredible athlete with a brain like a laser cutter. Shawn Michaels was a champion with a partner by his side, a partner who looked at him like he hung the moon. Shawn and Hunter were _connected_ even if they weren’t bonded, any idiot could see that.

When Seth was seventeen, Triple H married Stephanie McMahon and Seth locked himself in his bedroom and blared Metallica until his stepdad unscrewed the hinges on his door.

His stepdad sat on the bed next to him and rubbed his back, but Seth couldn’t explain himself, not properly. Shawn and Hunter couldn’t bond, and bonding was everything. Best friends and brothers in arms added up to zero. Seth wasn’t stupid. He knew that. He _knew_ it.

\---

Wrestling was the perfect combination of things that helped Dean live with the voices. The crowd rushed over him every, feeling in unison so he was getting slammed with _anger cheating motherfucker shit_ or _joy triumph please please I believe in you_ , pure, clean feelings that went down easy, instead of a thousand thoughts and wants battling to be heard. There was also plenty of the cleanest feeling of all – pain, physical, beautiful pain, pain that made his body pulse with life and cradled his brain quiet. Nothing was sweeter than having the hot pleasure of the crowd sloshing around in his stomach while the pain dripped out of him, red and jagged.

The third thing was painkillers. There were always painkillers in the locker room, ready to make Dean’s brain cozy and numb until he could wrestle again.

The time Dean spent in Puerto Rico passed in a haze, and when he got back to the states and got a good look at himself in was a shock to the system, a lukewarm pitcher of piss to the face. He’d lost so much weight he didn’t even look like a wrestler anymore, and for a while, work was hard to find.

He gave up the painkillers, after that. He needed to wrestle more than he needed to exist when he wasn’t wrestling, and two out of three wasn’t bad.

\---

Seth didn’t have a lot of friends at Ring of Honor. Part of it was that he was a little weird and annoying, too open in his fanboying, too opposed to going out and grabbing a beer.

Part of it was that being a zero meant something in the business. Part of it was the mark he carried with him, the shade of the Montreal Screwjob, the crimes that he could commit and no one would no until it was too late.

“It’s so asinine,” Jimmy Jacobs said, rolling his eyes. “Anyone with halfway decent shielding can fuck you over. Jesus, people act like Bret never screwed anyone.”

Seth hummed in response, but he knew that Jimmy was wrong and everyone else was right. Normal people couldn’t lie and scheme as boldly as zeros.

He just needed to let it tighten his resolve. Seth just had to work harder, stay longer, be truer.

Seth pumped iron until he thought he would cry from boredom. He ate clean and ripped calluses off his hands and called John Laurinaitis until he got where he was supposed to be.

\---

In 2011, Dean Ambrose met Seth Rollins at FCW.

\---

In 2011, Seth Rollins met Dean Ambrose at FCW.


	2. The Rise and Destruction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so, so sorry that it took me so long to write this. There are many reasons, but I'm just going to say "I'm going to fail out of Grad school and then die" and leave it at that. Hopefully this isn't disappointing orz

The second Dean stepped into the dingy FCW warehouse, he felt the absence like a hole in the head. A black hole, a lack of sound that sucked all nearby thoughts away, like gnawing through the last tendons on a leg that had been stuck in a bear trap for years.

Dean recognized Seth Rollins, standing around in his too-small trunks, the exact center of the dead spot. Dean had seen his tape before, heard his name tossed around, jerked it to his Cyberfights a couple times. They’d never been in the same room before, and Dean needed to touch him, badly, right now.

Terry Taylor stopped him with a hand on his arm. Dean just barely managed to restrain himself from biting it off. “Through here, Mr. Ambrose,” Taylor said. His irritation trickled through clear, even with Rollins swallowing the feelings away. “Hunter wants to see you, first thing.”

Dean followed, but he kept his eyes on Rollins until the door to Hunter’s office shut in his face.

\---

It didn’t take Dean long to work his way into a match with Rollins. He managed to get Rollins so mad he could spit something like five minutes after meeting him; after that, getting a title shot was cake. Rollins smoldered at him from across the ring, holding up his little medal, letting droplets of water trace the harsh angles of his face.

They locked up, and Dean plunged face-first into a tub of ice-cold water. The silence was so loud Dean could hear his ears ring, the panting of Rollins’ breath and the thump of his body on the canvas. The crowd was making noise but it had to get to Dean’s brain by way of his ears, barely even worth his notice.

Dean wanted to burrow inside of Rollins, bury himself into that blissful quiet.

It was the best match of Dean’s life, the thrill of it strumming through him even back in his locker room, his head painfully loud again without the downy blanket of silence he’d felt in the ring with Rollins. He almost thought he was imagining it when Rollins stormed in, flushed and sweaty and contained, and shoved himself into Dean’s space.

“That was –” Rollins grabbed Dean’s forearms, the kind of thing that usually made Dean smash faces, but Dean just froze, kept still to avoid breaking the spell. “That was so – I’ve never –” Rollins kept licking his lips and staring at Dean all over and Dean couldn’t read his mind but he was pretty sure he knew what he wanted anyway.

“That was the best match I’ve ever had,” Rollins said, breathless, and then they were fucking up against the thin door, fast and desperate and loud.

\---

The third time they fucked was in Rollins’ apartment, and by the sixth time, Dean had started to stay over. Seth liked to cuddle and Dean was gaining a new appreciation for it as well, especially when Seth took the guesswork out by putting Dean’s hands exactly where he wanted them to go.

“What’s wrong with you?” Dean mumbled into Seth’s neck. Seth liked it when he pressed his mouth to his shoulder, liked little kisses and feeling him breath during the night. Dean kept a hand pressed to Seth’s chest for the same reason.

“Hmf?” Seth grunted. His eyes were still closed. “Save the dirty talk for later,” he sighed.

Dean bit Seth’s shoulder thoughtfully. He didn’t know how to ask what he meant to, not out loud. Usually he would have just pulled the information straight from Seth’s head.

“Why can’t I read you?” he asked. “It’s like blocking but more.” Seth went stiff in his arms, but this wasn’t the first time Dean had pissed him off in bed. Dean kissed his way up Seth’s neck to his ear, then nosed his way around to mouth at the scar from his neck surgery, the kind of soft touches that Seth liked.

Finally, Seth said, “I’m a zero point zero.” It was the same iron tone he used whenever he gave his height, inviting the listener to try him. Dean didn’t know what that meant, though.

“The fuck does that mean,” Dean said, and Seth snorted, surprised despite himself.

“My psychics,” Seth said. “They test at zero.”

Dean turned that over in his head for a minute. “So… you don’t have ‘em?” he asked.

Seth had started to relax again, so it looked like Dean wasn’t getting kicked out tonight. “Yeah, I guess,” Seth said. He sounded kind of annoyed. “That’s what ‘zero’ means.”

“Well, just say that next time,” Dean grumbled. He let his eyes close. He was no psychics expert, but that seemed to make sense. It was other people’s psychics that left their thoughts open to him. Seth didn’t have them, so he was closed off, a wall where other people had a door. Simple. Dean was satisfied.

After a while, he felt Seth’s breathing slow, and then he could let himself relax into sleep.

\---

Being kicked out of FCW sucked. Being tapped to work dark matches for WWE was cool for a minute, and then that sucked. Dean had gotten used to living in one place, not dealing with the constant hassle of travel, performing for crowds that already kind of gave a fuck about him. Having Seth there to block out the worst of the psychic noise.

The first time he came back to Tampa, he flopped down on Seth’s bed and refused to move for an hour.

“You’re such a diva,” Seth groused, not even rubbing Dean’s head like a good boyfriend. “You used to do this all the time. How’d you deal with psychic shit before?”

“Drugs,” Dean said, and Seth gave the most dramatic sigh Dean had ever heard. And _Dean_ was the diva.

Seth nudged Dean’s head with his foot. “C’mere,” he ordered. Dean wrinkled his nose but squirmed into sitting position. Seth arranged him the same way he did in bed, guiding Dean to sit between his legs, back pressed to Seth’s chest.

“Close your eyes,” Seth said.

“Wayyyyy ahead of you,” Dean replied. He hadn’t opened his since he walked in; the light made his head hurt worse.

Dean felt Seth’s hands wrap lightly around his wrists. “Match my breathing,” Seth said.

Dean tried to obey. Seth was taking slow, deep breaths. Dean could feel his chest raising and lowering against his back, the air against his ear. “Is this some kind of weird meditation thing,” Dean asked.

Seth squeezed his wrists. “It’s a level one Mentation technique,” Seth said. “I learned it in first grade.”

“Fuckin’ nerd,” Dean said. Seth laughed, a short, surprised burst that tickled Dean’s cheek. Dean tried to avoid shivering in the cradle of Seth’s arms.

“Just breathe,” Seth said. “Feel the air entering and leaving your body. Feel your skin stretch and relax.”

It wasn’t hard to do. Dean called up the feeling of a hard workout, a good match. The primal awareness of his body and its limits.

“Imagine that your body is a container,” Seth said. He was using an irritating soothing voice that kind of made Dean want to headbutt him in the face, but he resisted. “It keeps your thoughts in and other thoughts out. Imagine that your skin is solid and impermeable. Nothing can pass through it.”

Dean’s first thought was a steel cage, but that was pretty much the opposite of impermeable. He shuffled through images – he felt most powerful when he wrestling, but he did that practically naked. Finally he decided to go literal with it; he pictured his skin turning to bronzed metal, curling around him like a full-body title belt.

“Got it?” Seth asked. His voice was hushed.

Dean ran a tongue over his lips. “Yeah,” he croaked.

“Hold that thought,” Seth said. “Now sharpen it.”

Dean wanted to roll his eyes – what did that even mean? – but he tried to, whatever, visualize harder –

Abruptly, Seth let go of his wrists and pulled away. Dean tensed, expecting the thoughts of their neighbors to rush in, but –

There was nothing, nothing but sweet, sweet silence. Dean sucked in a breath and the illusion flickered out of focus, letting the voices back in.

“Holy fuck,” Dean said. He felt shaken. Seth touched his shoulder, a strangely hesitant gesture.

“You good?” Seth asked.

Dean shook his head, not a denial, just trying to shake his thoughts loose. “Hell yeah,” he said. “One more rep, come on.”

Dean settled into Seth’s lap again and after a moment, Seth’s hands wrapped back around his wrists.

\---

The Shield was rock hard cool shit, pretty much immediately. Dean didn’t know fuck all about Roman except that he was strong like a motherfucker, but that was all he needed. Wrecking the best the main roster had to offer by night and riding Seth’s hot ass also by night – the whole thing was like a beautiful dream.

Dean’s blocking had been getting better, but it was hard to keep up and now that Seth was practically glued to his side, it was hard to work up the enthusiasm to practice. Roman’s psychics were at dull normal – Seth said he was literally the national average, which of course was something Seth knew off the top of his head. It took Dean a few weeks to realize that Roman had the most solid blocking he’d ever seen. Dean had to really focus to even pick up on surface emotions. He couldn’t get real thoughts at all without physical contact. It was weird, but kinda cool. Being between the two of them was like cruising down a highway with the best noise barriers ever built.

\---

Roman started to project his anger toward the end. Dean didn’t know if it was on purpose or if he was losing it or what; policing Roman’s emotional state wasn’t his business. Seth was the one who talked to him. Seth talked to people a lot, he was the one who chatted up other wrestlers, played fake guitar games with Woods and drank craft beer with Cesaro.

Dean tackled Seth to bed when he got back, sucked bruises wherever he could reach, kissed every other name out of his mouth. Dean was running hot all the time, dreams he had long since given up on now tantalizingly in reach. He lost the US title and flipped the fuck out for a minute, he got Seth tossed out of the Royal Rumble and slept alone for the first time in years. He flew in a helicopter and wrestled the Undertaker and decimated Evolution, victory sweet and thick in his mouth, and when Seth went for the steel chair, Dean couldn’t sense it at all.

He didn’t sense the blow on Roman or the strike to his stomach or to the back or the next or the next or the next or

They’d had sex the night before, lights on so they could kiss each other’s bruises. There was no part of Seth that Dean hadn’t touched and he hadn’t known, hadn’t ever known, even as the blows rained down Dean couldn’t feel him, not anything, not one thought.

\---

The next time Dean could think clearly he was in the hospital, flakes of cement dust still in his hair. The psychic shielding was so good that Dean was only picking up his own doctor and a couple other patients on the same floor, maybe a dozen voices in total. It was the quietest Dean’s head had been in months and he felt empty, scoured clean without the rage and joy of others to fuel him.

Dean passed all the concussion tests with flying colors – “You must have a hard head,” the doctor said, his nervousness leaking all over the joke – and got his walking papers after only three days of observation. Roman picked him up and neither of them spoke, the road churning away beneath their wheels.

They stopped someplace that wasn’t an airport or an arena or a diner or a hotel. Dean furrowed his brow and reached for Roman’s thoughts, but his barrier was up, strong as ever, stronger, maybe.

“I don’t want you to think this is an insult,” Roman said, bad sign, and then Dean saw the words _Psychic Research and Skill Development_ and tried to slug Roman in the jaw.

Roman had been expecting it, dodged and pounced, restrained him. Dean was furious, wildfire spreading inside of him. He scratched and bit and howled, just wanting to hurt, wanting to get away, wanting – wanting –

Dean had a black eye when he walked into the fucking loony bin and Roman had a fat lip, but Dean signed the papers and didn’t flinch when Ro hugged him on the way out.

“It’s only three weeks,” Roman said. “Call me, okay?”

Dean grunted and watched until long after Roman had driven away.


End file.
